Maria Urquides’ Hispanic background made her the ideal teacher for Arizona’s bilingual schools, although she readily admitted she might go to hell for being ordered to punish students for speaking Spanish in the classroom. She stepped on more than a few administrative toes to attain her goal of promoting bilingual/bicultural education to children of all […]

This presentation covers humankind’s water use and food supply interactions with Arizona’s ecology from Clovis culture hunter-gatherers to prehistoric irrigation canals, contemporary Hopi and Tohono O’odham dry farming, and present-day American farmers. We will examine how overhunting and climate change affected the wooly mammoth populations and the agriculture experiments that followed. From early attempts to […]

April 2025 will mark Arizona Highways magazine’s 100th birthday. How did a brochure produced by the Arizona Highway Department become one of the most revered travel publications in the world? How has Arizona Highways remained relevant for a century while other national magazines have failed? Former Arizona Highways Publisher, Win Holden, will share the inside […]

This presentation covers humankind’s water use and food supply interactions with Arizona’s ecology from Clovis culture hunter-gatherers to prehistoric irrigation canals, contemporary Hopi and Tohono O’odham dry farming, and present-day American farmers. We will examine how overhunting and climate change affected the wooly mammoth populations and the agriculture experiments that followed. From early attempts to […]

April 2025 will mark Arizona Highways magazine’s 100th birthday. How did a brochure produced by the Arizona Highway Department become one of the most revered travel publications in the world? How has Arizona Highways remained relevant for a century while other national magazines have failed? Former Arizona Highways Publisher, Win Holden, will share the inside […]

In 1960, Dr. Pearl Mao Tang became chief of the Maricopa County Bureau of Maternal and Child Health. A Chinese American, who had fought to obtain a medical license in Arizona, Tang was instrumental in lowering the infant mortality rate in the state’s most populous county. Working in the Phoenix metropolitan area and rural Maricopa […]

Arizona has become a hotbed of preserving vintage signage and neon. No wonder, with the rise of Arizona and automobile travel in the 40s, 50s and 60s. Thousands of people were traversing the broad expanses of highways and byways across the Southwest. As the cars sped past, restaurants, motels, curio shops and gas stations needed […]

This presentation explores the origins of zine culture – self-published, hand-bound, small- circulation publications that gave voice to historically marginalized populations – beginning with the fascicles of Emily Dickinson and the Little Magazines of the early 20th century, continuing through the Mimeo Poets of the mid-century to the punk phenomenon of the Riot Grrrls in […]

The Supreme Court United States (SCOTUS) in recent years has been in the news more than ever. Controversy and distrust accompany many of its major decisions to a degree that is driving a crisis in public confidence. SCOTUS “is suffering from a historic lack of trust and confidence,” Reporter Domenico Montanaro noted in a May […]